Many plants, also known as machines, have systems that provide the capability for diagnosing a problem therewithin. Such diagnostic systems can typically monitor various plant operations and collect data related thereto. The data can then be analyzed in order to determine whether or not a component performing a plant operation is functioning within predefined tolerance limits, should be replaced, etc.
One such type of plant can be a motor vehicle. Modern motor vehicles are becoming ever more complex and are requiring improved diagnostic systems. In particular, heretofore global diagnosis methods, i.e. diagnosis methods that collect diagnostic information from all of the subsystem electronic control units and analyze the information at a central location, are becoming more and more unpractical due to high communication requirements and time delays that result from a centralized diagnosis.
In response to inefficient global diagnosis methods, agent-based distributed diagnosis architectures have been developed where each subsystem of the motor vehicle can have a subsystem resident agent embedded within the subsystem electronic control unit, the subsystem resident agent operable to perform its own fault inference and communicate the diagnostic results to a vehicle expert agent. The vehicle expert agent can perform cross-subsystem diagnosis and resolve conflicts between subsystem resident agents. In addition, the vehicle expert agent can provide an accurate vehicle-level diagnostic inference.
However, it is appreciated that such agent-based distributed diagnosis architectures can be expensive and relatively inflexible with respect to new diagnosis architecture that may become available after the motor vehicle has been introduced to the market. As such, a distributed diagnosis agent architecture and/or more effective/efficient algorithm that is simplified with respect to current architectures and has no impact on existing plant electronic control unit hardware and little or no impact on existing plant electronic control unit structure would be desirable.